Boost your Ecommerce Revenue Through Upselling and Cross Selling

Last updated on March 23, 2018

Upselling and Cross Selling is an art of sales strategy where you introduce/ recommend complementary or better products to your customer according to their need and what they are currently interested in.

These sales strategy has been used for decades by the seller’s and turns out to be an excellent strategy for not only seller’s but customers are also getting a lot of advantages.

According to Forrester research analysis, upsell and cross-sell strategies are solely responsible for an average of 10-30% of e-commerce business revenues.

Now, let’s jump into these topics and know what they actually do and are so important or your e-commerce business.

What is Upselling?

Upselling is a strategy whenever the seller encourages the customer to spend more on additional opportunities/products or services of the current consideration, for the purpose of making larger sales.

What is Cross-Selling?

Cross Selling is a strategy whenever you try to recommend your customer to spend more on additional products/services that complement their existing products (generally complements the existing product but is a different product).

Upselling Vs. Cross-Selling

You might be easily confused with these two selling strategies, however, cross-selling and upselling are different sales strategies.

Let’s get you clear about these two strategies with the help of a simple example.

Suppose, a customer is buying a laptop.

Upsell strategy: A customer selects a laptop, now the customer is presented with the options of upgrading the process of RAM and processor. Here, the seller is giving an option or more we can say trying to sell equipment to make the laptop faster and more powerful.

The basic idea here is to sell more product to the customer of the current consideration at the same time.

Cross-sell strategy: Once the customer is done with upgrading the processor and RAM, now the seller provides them with the option like air cooler for laptop or printer. Additional products are the logical accessory for many consumers. Thus, this is known as cross-selling.

Implementation through Add-on Sales & Bundle Sales.

Add-On Sales

Add-On sales are the extra little services such as

Protection plans

Tech-support subscriptions

Product training

These services give your customers an extra piece of mind. This way, the strategy crucially increase the lifetime or loyalty value of your customer.

According to the research, if you can analyze various price points, factoring in risks/cost conditions, you can increase your online profit up to 40%.

Bundle Sales

Bundle sales is a selling strategy when two or more products that complement each other can be added to the cart from the product page or checkout.

Product bundles are often sold at a discount price in order to raise the perceived value of buying multiple products at once.

Ways to get most out of Upselling and Cross Selling

First Way

To make the best use of bundled products, an individual product must be there as well.

According to the research done by Vineet Kumar of HBS, when the seller only makes the bundle products options available, revenues are reduced by 20%.

Second Way

Third Way

As a seller, you need to offer your proposals in an obvious worse option, so that they can focus on the obvious option that actually works for them.

The reason behind this is that too many options make the customers confused and often leads them towards making no decision at all.

According to the Cisco research, 78% of shoppers are taking the help of internet to surf and get valuable details on their purchased products in order to know that they are getting most out of that product.

Fourth Way

You should always add complementary products at the checkout page.

With the help of this cross-sell technique at the checkout page, you can increase your sales and revenue by up to 3%.

Benefits of Upselling and Cross Selling

Increase online revenue

In online business, Upselling and Cross Selling is the best sales strategy to increase your online revenue and profit. The secret behind these strategies is that it takes less of your effort and money to implement and still leads to high success rate.

You can also search for statistics showing Upselling and Cross Selling leading online business to the high success rate and profitability.

Increase Average Order Value

Promotion of products

Upselling and Cross Selling not only helps you to increase your online revenue and AOV but also boosts your various products to your customers as needed.

For example, when a customer buys any digital electronics such as camera, you can recommend them with memory card or camera stand or high-quality lenses because there are the basic things that go with the camera. Not only your camera is on the verge of sale but you can also promote your other products as well.

Always, promote your products(relevant) to your customer as required.

Note: Don’t Overdo it.

Increase customer loyalty

With the help of Cross Selling, you can increase the loyalty of your customer.

Let’s make it clear with an insurance example if you are selling a group health insurance to your customer and then at a very competitive rate and then cross-sell them on life insurance then it tells them that your care and recommendation for them helps to solve their multiple problems.

Why go anywhere else when you can have all the needed solutions in one place?

Develop more leads

Another advantage of Cross Selling is that it helps you to generate and increase the leads for your online business. If you maintain your customer loyalty and make them cared for, then definitely they will recommend your products to someone else as well.

This way you are not only generating leads for your business but also getting the genuine lead referrals as well.

Wrapping it up

I know, online business motives are always to focus on while increasing sales and average order value. But don’t overdo it. You also need to understand the experience of your customer’s behavior.

You must be careful while offering the array of products to your customers – right products at the right time make more sense. Do not confuse your customer with unwanted and random products.

Keeping it simple, better experience and up to your customer’s mark will automatically lead your way towards increasing sales and revenue. If you want to know more then connect with our team to guide you through your online business journey.